Numa Files: Ghost Ship Part 2

Joe turned on the spotlight, and the rain became a field of slashing lines. The effect was blinding for a moment, but once Joe got the angle right, Kurt could see the hull more clearly. He caught a glimpse of orange.

"There! Near the bridge."

The pilot saw it too. He maneuvered the helicopter closer, as Joe unlatched himself and came back to operate the winch.

"This cable isn't designed to hoist people," he reminded Kurt.

"It tows a sonar array," Kurt said.

"The fish only weighs ninety pounds."

"It'll do the job," Kurt said. "Now, release the tension."

Joe hesitated, and once Kurt had looked down and gauged their position, he reached up and punched the tensioner himself. Before Joe could stop him, he'd dropped from the edge of the helicopter.

Holding a mask to his face and pointing his feet straight down, Kurt hit the water at the top of a swell and plunged through it. For a long moment, he was bathed in the strange muted silence of the sea. It was calming and peaceful.

And then he surfaced into the maelstrom.

The swells were like rolling mountains, and droplets from the torrential downpour danced on the surface in every direction.

Turning to the floundering yacht, Kurt began kicking hard toward it.

Reaching the vessel amidships, he stretched for the rail. Before he could get a firm grip, a trough rolled by, and he dropped down along the side of the hull. He fought to stay in position, until the next swell arrived. It carried him upward until he was even with the deck. This time he quickly grabbed the rail and pulled himself aboard. He clambered across the deck, scarcely avoiding being washed overboard by another wave.

He reached the bridge, where he found the windows smashed in. The orange flash he'd a.s.sumed to be a life vest was nowhere to be seen.

"Sienna!" he shouted. It was useless against the wind.

He peered inside. Several feet of water sloshed around. For a second he thought he saw a body, but the power was out, and in the darkness it could have been anything. He grabbed the hatchway door and yanked it open, forcing his way in.

The vessel groaned ominously as it wallowed in the storm. Everything around Kurt seemed to be moving. He raised his arm and switched on a waterproof flashlight that was strapped to it.

The beam played on the water and flared as it reflected off a wall of gla.s.s behind the bridge. In some corner of his mind, Kurt remembered reading about the yacht's design. Every wall in the upper deck was acrylic. It was supposed to make the inside of the vessel seem more s.p.a.cious. If privacy was needed, they could be darkened with the flick of a switch.

Another wave hit the ship and she rolled a little farther. Kurt found himself sliding toward that gla.s.s wall as green seawater began pouring in through the open hatch.

Furniture, charts, life vests, and other kinds of detritus sloshed around him. Kurt stood and steadied himself. His arm came out of the water, and the light played off the gla.s.s once again. For a moment, it flared, blinding him, but as he adjusted his aim he saw a face on the other side. A woman's face framed in wet blond hair. A child floated beside her, a towheaded blond girl, no more than six or perhaps seven. Her eyes were open but unresponsive.

Kurt lunged toward them only to crash into a gla.s.s part.i.tion.

"Sienna!" he shouted.

There was no response.

The water was rising more rapidly now. It swirled up around Kurt's chest as he slammed his fist against the gla.s.s and then tried to smash it with a chair he found floating beside him. The part.i.tion held against two solid blows. And as Kurt reared back for a third swing, the ship rolled farther and the water reached his neck.

The yacht was going over. He could feel it.

Without warning, the harness snapped tight around him, and Kurt felt himself being dragged backward.

"No!" he shouted, only to swallow a mouthful of water.

He was being pulled backward against a great current flooding into the bridge. It was like being dragged upward through a waterfall. For a brief instant, he saw the faces again, and then his mask was ripped off and the world went blurry and green. The cable jerked once more, pulling him hard and slamming his head against the doorframe in the process.

Dazed and barely conscious, Kurt sensed he'd been pulled free. But his progress was slowing. Some part of him knew the reason: Joe and the pilot must have maneuvered the helicopter to drag him out of the sinking vessel. They'd managed to yank him clear, but the cable must have snapped, perhaps when he hit the bulkhead.

He tried to swim, kicking feebly, but his mind was cloudy and his muscles were mostly unresponsive. Instead of rising, he was being pulled deeper, drawn down by the suction of the sinking yacht. He saw it beneath him, a gray blur retreating from the beam of his light.

Thinking only of survival, he turned his gaze upward. Above him, Kurt saw a ring of silvery light. And then, feeling only simple fascination, he watched it close like the pupil of a vast discerning eye.

With a jolt, Kurt bolted upright in his bed. He was drenched in sweat and gasping for air, and his heart pounded as if he'd just run up a mountain. For a moment, he held still and stared into the darkness, trying to free himself from the grasp of the nightmare and the powerful emotions that lingered in the afterlife of a dream.

The process was always the same, a quick realization of where he was and then a brief moment of uncertainty as if the mind was torn deciding which world was reality and which was illusion.

Thunder rumbled outside, accompanied by a dim flash of lightning and the sound of the rain pelting his deck.

He was at home, in his own bedroom, in the boathouse he owned on the banks of the Potomac River. Not drowning in the failed rescue attempt that had taken place months earlier and half a world away.

"Are you all right?" a soothing female voice asked.

Kurt recognized the voice. Anna Ericsson, as kind as she was pretty. A natural blonde with striking green eyes, the fairest of eyebrows, and a perfect little nose that turned up at the end. For some reason, he wished she was somewhere else at this moment.

"No," Kurt said, throwing the covers back. "I'm far from all right."

He climbed out of bed and went to the window.

"It's just a nightmare," she said. "Repressed memories working their way out."

Kurt could feel his head pounding, not just with a headache but at the back of his skull, where he'd sustained a hairline fracture as Joe had pulled him free of the sinking yacht. "They're not repressed," he said. "To be honest with you, I wish they were."

She was calm. Not one to respond to his agitation. "Did you see them?" she asked.

Thunder crashed outside, and the rain rattled against the Arcadia door with renewed vigor. Kurt wondered if the rain had triggered the nightmare. Then again, he didn't need anything to trigger them. They seemed to come almost nightly.

"Did you see them this time?" she asked again.

Kurt exhaled in frustration, waved her off, and made his way to the wet bar in the living room. Anna followed seconds later, wearing yoga pants and one of his T-shirts. He couldn't help but admire how pretty she was. Even in the middle of the night. Even without a bit of makeup.

He switched on a light. It pained his eyes for a moment but allowed him to pluck a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel's off the tray. He noticed that his hand was shaking. He poured himself a double.

"You know it means something," she prodded.

He gulped some of the whiskey. "Can we please keep the psychoa.n.a.lyzing to office hours?"

She was supposed to be his therapist. In the aftermath of the concussion, he'd begun to have tremors and other issues. The nightmares came first, then memory problems and barely suppressed feelings of rage that those who knew him were right to consider out of character.

In response, NUMA had a.s.signed Ms. Ericsson to act as his therapist and counselor. In a fit of spite against those who were trying to help him, Kurt had spent weeks playing the role of a curmudgeon. It hadn't been enough to ward her off, and the two had ended up seeing each other on a more-than- professional basis.

Kurt swigged some more whiskey and winced at the pain. He noticed a container of aspirin beside the liquor bottles and reached for it. How many nights this week had he repeated this same routine? Four? Five? He tried to add them up but couldn't honestly recall. It had become far too common.

"Have you been to work lately?" she said, plopping down on the edge of his couch.

Kurt shook his head. "I can't go to work until you fix me, remember?"

"You're not broken, Kurt. But you are in pain. No matter how much you want to pretend. You suffered a severe concussion, a fractured skull, and an emotional trauma all at the same time. For months, you displayed every symptom of a traumatic brain injury. And you're continuing to have some of them. Beyond that, you're a textbook case of survivor's guilt."

"I have nothing to feel guilty about," he insisted. "I did the best I could."

"I know that," she said. "Everyone involved knows that. But you don't believe it."

He didn't know what to believe. Literally.

"Even Brian Westgate knows what you tried to do was heroic."

"Brian Westgate," Kurt muttered with disdain.

She picked up on the tone in his voice, the one that signaled an uptick in his level of agitation, but she pushed anyway.

"He still wants to meet with you, you know. Shake your hand. Tell you thanks." She paused. "Have you even returned his calls?"

Of course he hadn't. "I've been a little busy."

She was studying him, nodding slightly. "That's it, isn't it?"

"What's it?"

"You were supposed to marry Sienna but you drove her away. If you hadn't done that, she wouldn't have met Westgate. No Westgate, no yacht. No yacht, no storm. No storm, no sinking. And no failed attempt to rescue her. That's what you're blaming yourself for."

Survivor's guilt was complicated. Kurt knew this. He had friends who'd come back from Iraq and Afghanistan. They'd done heroic things, more heroic than anything he'd done, and yet they blamed themselves for much of what went wrong.

He took a breath and looked away. There was too much truth in what she'd said for him to argue, but for reasons he wasn't willing to explain it didn't help him much. He turned his attention back to the aspirin, pried the top off the bottle and popped a few of the pills into his mouth. He chased them down with more whiskey.

Feeling his headache was now being properly treated, he turned back to Anna and tried to be more civil. "Why does it matter?" he asked. "Why does it matter so much to you?"

"Because it's my job," she said. "And because like an idiot I chose to care about you as more than a patient."

"No," he said, correcting her. "Why does it matter whether I see them in the dream or not? You keep asking about that. Why does that matter to you?"

She paused and stared up at him. The look was a mix of kindness and frustration. "It doesn't matter to me," she said. "It matters to you."

Kurt stared.

"Based on what you've told me, the dreams are all the same," she pointed out. "Except in half of them, you see this blond Caucasian woman and one of her children, while in the rest you see nothing but debris and empty life jackets. You can't even be sure the woman is Sienna. But either way, real or imagined, you couldn't reach them, the ship went down, and, unfortunately, they're gone. End of story."

She tilted her head a bit. A look of empathy settled on her face. "To the rest of the world, it doesn't make a difference because the outcome is the same. But these alternate dreams- these alternate realities-they must matter to you or you wouldn't keep having them. The sooner you figure out why, the sooner you'll begin to feel better."

He could only stare. She was closer to the truth than she knew.

"I see" was all he could say.

She sighed. "I shouldn't have come over," she said, reaching for her sneakers and slipping them on. "For that matter, I shouldn't have kissed you. But I'm glad I did."

She stood up and grabbed her coat off a rack by the door. "I'm going home," she said. "Go back to work, Kurt. It might do you some good. In fact, go see Westgate. He's actually in Washington. He's making some big announcement tomorrow on the steps of the Smithsonian. He's probably not the b.a.s.t.a.r.d you think he is. And it might give you some closure."

She pulled her coat on, opened the door to the sound of rain on the driveway, then stepped through and shut it behind her. Seconds later, the engine of her Ford Explorer rumbled to life, followed by the sound of her backing out and up the hill onto River Road.

Kurt stared at the empty s.p.a.ce for a minute. With a gulp, he finished the drink and wavered on whether to pour himself another. He put the tumbler down. It didn't help much anyway.

Instead of another drink, he walked through the living room and slid open the Arcadia door that led out onto the deck. The rain was relentless, beading up on the freshly stained wood like quicksilver in a lab tray. The river was covered in dancing droplets just like the sea in his dream.

Why did it matter?

He walked to the railing. As the rain soaked him, it seemed to draw some of the agony out. Far to the left he saw the red taillights of Anna's Ford as she drove off.

Why did he try harder and harder to see the truth each time the dream started?

He knew the answer to this mystery, it had come to him weeks ago, but he kept it to himself. He couldn't tell anyone, certainly not his therapist.

Soaking wet, he stepped back inside, grabbed a towel to dry his hands and face, and dropped into the chair at his desk.

Tossing the towel aside, he flicked on the computer and waited as the screen lit up. After typing in his main pa.s.sword, he clicked an icon that required a second pa.s.sword. It brought up a series of encrypted e-mails.

The latest had been sent by a former Mossad agent whom Kurt knew through a third party. Money had been wired and received, and the man agreed to investigate a rumor.

The e-mail read rather matter-of-factly.

Can neither confirm nor deny the presence of Sienna Westgate in Mashhad or surrounding area.

Mashhad was a city in northern Iran, suspected of being the headquarters of a new technical group working for the Iranian military. No one was certain just what they were up to, but the Iranians were believed to be desperately upgrading their cybersecurity and attack force. Embittered that the U.S. had somehow gotten a virus known as Stuxnet into their nuclear-processing facilities and caused a thousand high-priced centrifuges to spin out of control until they exploded, the Iranians were not only looking to protect themselves, they were planning to hit back.

Part of that effort seemed to involve foreigners who'd been spotted shuffling in and out of Mashhad, sometimes under guard.

Kurt read the rest of the e-mail.

On good authority, I've been informed that three Western persons, two male, one female, were in Mashhad for some time. They were present for at least nineteen and possibly as many as thirty days. It's unclear if these individuals were captives or paid experts. Description of the female matches Mrs. Westgate in size and approximate age but not hair color. No photographs are available. Subject did not appear to be injured or to favor either hand in daily activities.

She was seen arriving and leaving the suspected defense building in northern Mashhad under light security. No coercion was evident. No mistreatment detected.

All three individuals were spotted departing via small aircraft twenty one days ago. No information has been uncovered to accurately suggest the destination of that aircraft or the current whereabouts or welfare of the persons on board.

Kurt closed the file.

Why did it matter what he saw in the dreams? Because, despite all evidence to the contrary, he'd become convinced that Sienna was alive. And if she was alive, he could think of only one reason she'd be doing work for the Iranians: her children, Tanner and Elise. Someone had to be holding them hostage and using them as leverage against her.

He knew it was a stretch of logic, supposition piled upon supposition. Considering the facts, it was irrational and unreasonable, and yet he felt it with every fiber of his being. Only the dreams made him doubt.

If the empty salon and the abandoned yacht were the true memories, then he had reason to believe, to hope, and to trust his instincts.